The stairs led them to a long and narrow corridor, now brightly lit by powerful forensics spotlights. Karen Ward’s apartment was number 305, the last one on the right. Nicholas Holden, one of the CSI team’s fingerprint experts, was kneeling outside her front door, busy dusting it for latent prints.

‘You mentioned that she was single,’ Garcia said as they made their way down the corridor.

‘She was,’ Velasquez confirmed.

‘Do you know if she was seeing anyone? Had a boyfriend?’

The sergeant knew exactly why Garcia had asked that question – a young woman is brutally murdered inside her own apartment without any apparent motive and no signs of a break-in, and the names that will comprise the initial ‘person of interest list’ will belong mainly to the people with whom the victim might’ve had any sort of romantic involvement in the past few years. In the USA, so called ‘crimes of passion’ account for over half of violent homicides committed against women.

‘Sorry, Detective, but we didn’t have time to gather that sort of information.’ The sergeant clarified, glancing at his watch. ‘The truth is, we were able to find out very little about the victim and what happened in her apartment before it was confirmed that this investigation was to be passed on to the LAPD’s UVC Unit.’ He paused and turned to face both detectives. ‘Frankly, those kind of decisions usually piss me off. This is our jurisdiction, so this should be our investigation, comprendes? We’re not “little league” over here. But this case had Violent Crimes Unit written all over it from the get-go, so we were all expecting it anyway.’ He showed Hunter and Garcia his palms in a surrender gesture. ‘And in this case, you’ll get no complaints from me, or any of my men. You want that evil in there . . . you won’t have to ask twice. It’s all yours.’

Hunter and Garcia were now frowning at Velasquez.

‘Hold on a sec,’ Garcia said. ‘What do you mean – “this case had Violent Crimes Unit written all over it from the get-go”?’

The sergeant’s stare moved from Garcia to Hunter and then back to Garcia. ‘You weren’t told about the phone call?’

The reply from both detectives came in the form of inquisitive silence.

‘Oh, man!’ Sergeant Velasquez looked down at the floor while shaking his head. ‘OK,’ he began. ‘Nine-one-one received a call from a semi-hysterical woman at around eleven-twenty last night. The woman was making very little sense, but she was screaming the word “murder”. As we all know, that’s a “red flag”. The call was transferred to our precinct and then to my desk.’

‘So you talked to her yourself?’ Garcia asked.

The sergeant nodded. ‘And she was indeed hysterical, claiming that someone had murdered her best friend right in front of her eyes.’ He paused, lifting his right index finger as he clarified. ‘Well, not exactly right in front of her eyes, but she was allowed to . . . or better yet, forced to watch it via a video-call.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Garcia’s unsure look had quickly turned into a confused one.

‘You heard right, Detective. The woman was yelling down the phone, claiming that some psycho had called her from Miss Ward’s cellphone, and forced her to play some sort of game, in which her friend’s life depended on it.’

‘A game?’ Hunter this time.

‘That’s what she said, yes. Look, I don’t know the specifics because, as I’ve said, the woman was going hysterical. The first thing I needed to do was follow protocol and send a black-and-white unit down here to check on the alleged murder victim, a Miss Karen Ward. A couple of uniforms drove by just before midnight and guess what? The door was unlocked. They walked in to check on her and . . . you guys being here is the result.’

‘You said that this hysterical woman claimed to be the victim’s best friend?’ Garcia asked.

Velasquez nodded. ‘Her name is Tanya Kaitlin. I have her details back in my vehicle. I’ll get them all to you before you go.’

As Hunter, Garcia and Velasquez finally reached apartment 305, Hunter greeted the CSI fingerprint expert. ‘Hey, Nick.’

‘Hey guys,’ the agent replied robotically.

After signing the crime-scene manifesto, Hunter, Garcia and Velasquez were handed a disposable white Tyvek jumpsuit each, together with a pair of latex gloves. As they began suiting up, Hunter noticed the fire exit door at the end of the corridor, past Karen Ward’s apartment.

‘Where does that lead to, do you know?’

‘Metal stairs that will take you down to an alleyway at the back of the building,’ Velasquez explained. ‘Go left and you’ll come out on Newport Avenue. Go right and you’re on Loma Avenue.’

Before zipping up his jumpsuit, Hunter walked over to the exit door to have a better look at it. The internal push bar on the fire resistant door indicated that it could only be opened from his side. It would offer no access into the building, but coming from apartment 305 it would’ve provided a much faster exit route than tracking back down the corridor all the way to the concrete staircase at the other end.

Hunter pushed the bar down, unlocking the door. Not a sound. The door wasn’t alarmed. As he turned to face the door to apartment 305 again, he noticed the CSI agent tilting his head to one side first, staring at the door, then tilting it to the other side and staring at it again.

‘Find something, Nick?’

‘Just checking against the light,’ Holden replied without deviating his attention from his work, his nose mask bobbing up and down as he spoke. ‘But I’d say that so far we’ve got about three different sets of prints here, and I’ve just got started.’

Hunter nodded his understanding. ‘Could you do us a favor and also dust the fire exit door when you’re done there? I’d like to run a comparison test between the fingerprints found on both doors.’

Holden glanced at the fire exit. ‘Sure. No problem.’

Both detectives finished suiting up and pulled the hoods of their coveralls over their heads; a second later they stepped into apartment 305.

Five

Karen Ward’s front door opened into a small entrance hall with a couple of large flower prints hanging from its white walls. A warm-red anti-slip rug greeted everyone as they walked through the door. Separation between the hall and the rest of the apartment came via a makeshift chimed beaded-curtain that dropped from the ceiling in uneven strands.

Hunter hadn’t seen one of those since he was a young kid. His grandmother used to have one in her kitchen.

The chimes rang noisily as he pulled the curtain to one side and he and Garcia stepped through into the apartment’s living room. Before following them inside, Sergeant Velasquez crossed himself, murmuring a few Spanish words as he did so.

The living room was relatively spacious and it had been pleasantly decorated with just a few well-chosen pieces of modern furniture, but its main feature was no doubt the large, glass sliding doors behind another beaded-curtain at the far end of the room, leading out into a corner balcony. A compact open-plan kitchen sat against the north wall. Strategically positioned to separate the kitchen from the living room area was a dark pinewood, four-seater dining table. On the other side of the table, by a dark wood display cabinet, there was a full length mirror. Both detectives paused as they entered the room, their attention immediately drawn to the chair at the head of the table and to the horribly mutilated body sitting on it.

Hunter’s eyes narrowed as his brain picked up the pace to try to understand the savagery he was looking at.

The victim had been stripped naked. Her arms had been pinned down to the sides of her body by a thin nylon rope, which tightly looped several times around her torso, just under her breasts, and around the back of the chair. Two separate pieces of rope had been used to securely restrain her ankles to the legs of the chair. She was sitting upright, with her head slightly slumped forward, as if she had fallen asleep, bringing her chin to less than an inch from her chest. But what made Hunter doubt his eyes were the many shards of thick, mirrored glass that had been violently rammed into the woman’s face, disfiguring it into an unrecognizable mess of skin, glass and flesh. Blood had cascaded from her facial wounds in heavy sheets, covering her entire torso and thighs in crimson red before dripping down on to the wooden floor and pooling up under the chair. Part of the tabletop, just by where the victim had been sitting, had also been sprinkled by blood.